MAYBE THEY HAVE A “SECRET PLAN”

6/17/11

This morning’s (i.e., Friday, 6/17’s) Wall Street Journal reported on its first page that the military is asking President Obama to delay the withdrawal of the “surge” troops (i.e., the 33,000 soldiers sent into that quagmire in order to bring our troop total to 100,000 and who have been responsible for the manifest success the military, the Bush/Obama Administration, and bipartisan War Party on the Hill claims we are enjoying in that graveyard of empires) from Afghanistan until the Fall of 2012. The plan currently is to start pulling out the surge troops next month and have much of the drawdown completed by the end of 2011. The military argues that it would like to remain at full strength through next year’s heavy fighting season, which starts in the Spring and winds down in the Fall.

Cynics immediately suspected a political motive behind the Fall, 2012 withdrawal, to wit, that the troops will be coming home just as Barack Obama is running for reelection, thus providing a boost to his campaign. I have to part with my brother and sister cynics on this issue. It would be easy to see why the military would like to do their commander-in-chief a favor; despite all his empty talk in the 2008 campaign of disengaging us from the pointless foreign adventures of George Bush, Barack Obama has turned out to be at least as enthusiastic about pointless, expensive, and counterproductive military involvement as was George Bush. However, one suspects that the military is not so breathless for Barack Obama that it would pick such an inopportune time for a partial Afghan withdrawal. Remember that the military, though it is the federal government’s most important bureaucracy, is, at its roots, a federal bureaucracy. As such, it constantly seeks ways to justify and expand its considerable portion of the fruits of the labors of the American people, or lately, its share of the product of the Fed’s hyperkinetic printing presses. Thus, while there are some clear thinking visionaries in our military who display common sense and deliberative thinking, most of its leadership simply wants to expand its purview and thus would prefer staying in Afghanistan more or less forever. If the goal is to keep as many troops as possible in Afghanistan for as long as possible, the worst time to schedule a pullout would be during an election season. The last thing Mr. Obama wants to do while running for reelection is to announce that he will forgo a schedule withdrawal and keep the surge troops in Afghanistan. In other words, a scheduled pullout in the Fall of 2012 will be a done deal; there will be no going back. If the military really wants to stay in Afghanistan forever, they would schedule the drawdown for mid to late November of 2012, after the election. Such a drawdown would be easier to rescind.

So why is the military proposing a Fall, 2012 drawdown? One could concoct a number of interesting theories. The most obvious, but not the most plausible, is that I am wrong and that they want to help their friend in the White House more than they want to stay in Afghanistan. An only slightly less obvious motivation is that the military leadership wants to stay as long as they possibly can, and feel that a Fall, 2012 drawdown would be at about the limits of the American people’s tolerance for the type of nation building exercise the Bush/Obama administration swore it would avoid. Another is that Fall of 2012 really means late fall 2012, as in late November, early December, for reasons I outlined in the last paragraph. A fourth theory of the military’s motivations is that they would like to undermine Mr. Obama by scheduling a drawdown during the election season and then finding a reason to rescind it, hurting his reelection chances and getting a president who is even more friendly, if such a thing were possible, to the expansionist bureaucratic dreams of the military. A fifth is that the military really thinks that the American people are fully behind our effort in Afghanistan and that Mr. Obama might rescind the partial withdrawal just to win the favor of the American people at election time. This theory is, of course, the least plausible, or at least I hope it is.

The last, and most interesting, theory is that cooler heads than we cynical types think are in charge at the Pentagon. They see the futility of Afghanistan and want to get out as expeditiously as possible. Scheduling the withdrawal for an election season, thus insuring that it will take place, is a first and giant step toward getting us out of the quagmire that is hurting not only the country but also the esteem in the eyes of the people of its military leadership. This theory, too, may be implausible, but even one as cynical as I hopes that it proves to be the correct theory.